About the Department

The department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark is a dedicated group of faculty, staff, and students, working to understand human life past and present (and even future).

Sociology and Anthropology are closely linked disciplines and the department's sociologists and anthropolgists work together and carry out research in Newark and all over the world.

Our faculty use the methods of the social sciences to investigate a wide range of questions. Questions they are investigating right now include: the causes and origins of war; how low-wage labor impacts rain forest conservation projects; how social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and class shape and are shaped by identity; the origins of political violence and genocide; how transnational networks shape people’s political imagination and action; the politics of technological development; the sociology of solitary action in high culture and everyday life; comparative youth violence; patterns and sources of global variation in juvenile crime and systems of justice; forces contributing to academic achievement levels of different generations of immigrant children; how civil resistance can promote equitable distribution of land and resources; and the complex relationship between inequality and racial, ethnic, and class diversity in neighborhoods. Our faculty also specializes in a diverse assortment of methodologies including ethnography, oral history, hierarchical linear modeling, as well as historical and comparative methods.